Scientific Research
Overview of my research interests.
Overview of my research interests.
I am a Neuroscientist interested in attention, thalamo-cortical dynamics, consciousness, and how to study complex physical systems.
The primary focus of my research is two pronged:
I am currently a postdoctoral fellow in The Tandon Lab at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston, TX, USA, where I completed my PhD in 2025.
I view attention to be linked to the subjective experience of conscious awareness, and seek to identify the neural dynamics underlying this process in my ongoing and future research. I am drawn to theories of how neural synchrony and rhythmic dynamics coordinate increased attention and conscious processing in the brain. As such, I am very interested in studying neural dynamics across altered states of consciousness, be that natural sleep, anaesthetized states, or disorders of consciousness.
I am very interested in how the energetic constraints of neural design shape neural dynamics. I am especially interested in network models incorporating thalamo-cortical dynamics, especially when considering gating mechanisms for what sensory or cognitive information reaches awareness in conscious and unconscious states. Overall, I am interested in understanding how emergent network dynamics support flexible cognition across brain states.
Scientific communication is important to me, and I have been working on developing this skillset volunteering for Brainpost, developing article summaries and topic overviews covering recent neuroscience publications and discoveries here.
Throughout my PhD and postdoctoral resarch, I have examined the interplay between specialization and generalizability in population-level neural activity that support flexible cognition. I have probed these questions through the lens of intracranial EEG (iEEG) recordings in humans (sEEG, SDE, and single-unit recordings), scalp EEG, cortical stimulation mapping, as well as DBS and RNS recordings.
A consistent interest of mine is understanding the limits of tools available to study the brain, and to clarify how neural representations are linked across these spatial scales. I have validated several assumptions about the locality of iEEG signals and clarified how electrode type, referencing scheme, and filtered frequency influence electrode listening zone McCarty et al., 2022. These findings experimentally validate analytic methods used to ascribe recorded neural activity to cortical space.
Using a combination of ECoG and cortical stimulation mapping during an awake craniotomy, I revealed a mosaic of broadband gamma activation (BGA) for music and language within the superior temporal gyrus McCarty et al., 2023. Beyond ECoG analyses alone, stimulation mapping provided a degree of causal evidence for a mosaic of necessity of different high-order auditory regions in either music or language perception or production. These findings indicate shared neural resources for language and music comprehension in high-order auditory cortex, alongside domain-specific specialization for their respective structural features.
My current research investigates flexible attention, or the prioritization of relevance information and filtering out of distractors. (McCarty et al., in prep). These findings provide novel insight into how dynamics within high-order sensory and frontoparietal attentional networks support adaptive, goal-directed behavior.
My theoretical research has developed in several directions, alongside my experimental work. Before beginning my PhD studies, I developed an interest in thalamo-cortical circuitry while working as a research assistant in Dr. Audrey Brumback's Autism and Neurodevelopment Lab. I developed a theoretical project linking first-person reports and clinical findings with basic neuroanatomy and physiology to better understand stereotypies, or semi-voluntary repetitive movements that are a prominent clinical feature of autism spectrum disorder. I generated novel testable hypotheses that stereotypies improve sensory processing and attention by regulating brain rhythms, either directly from the rhythmic motor command, or via rhythmic sensory feedback generated by the movements (McCarty & Brumback, 2021). This project exemplifies my interest in interdisciplinary and theoretical work, integrating research from different methodologies and model systems to better understand a common topic.
I am very interested in developing clear theoretical frameworks for incorporating single-unit human data alongside local field potential recordings to understand cognitive processes. Without a strong theoretical foundation explaining why neural dynamics should encode information at different scales, there is a risk of erroneously conflating correlation with true representational clarity. The central question remains as to whether different neural correlates reflect genuine coding mechanisms the brain uses to represent information.